


The Row

by sidebyside_archivist



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Imprisonment, M/M, POV Original Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-06-01
Updated: 2003-06-01
Packaged: 2020-06-27 05:16:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19784011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidebyside_archivist/pseuds/sidebyside_archivist
Summary: Written for the KSOF 2003 first round (will there be a second? Only our list-mom knows for sure.)  Challenge: Kirk and Spock wake up on a prison ship.





	The Row

**Author's Note:**

> Note from LadyKardasi and Sahviere, the archivists: this story was originally archived at [Side by Side](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Side_by_Side_\(Star_Trek:_TOS_zine\)) and was moved to the AO3 as part of the Open Doors project in 2019. We tried to reach out to all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are the creator and would like to claim this work, please contact us using the e-mail address on [Side by Side’s collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/sidebyside/profile).
> 
> Author's Note:  
> Warning: Although there is no explicit sex, there is sex in the background, and the implication of violent non-con sex. This A/U assumes that there was no need to find the whales, and the boys went back to Earth without saving the planet.

“ _I shall be telling this with a sigh_  
_Somewhere ages and ages hence:_  
_Two roads diverged in a wood, and I_  
_I took the one less traveled by,_  
_And that has made all the difference_.”

Robert Frost, ‘The Road Less Travelled’

***

They brought them in like we all come in; drugged, unaware of the passages that lead into this hell-hole, and naked for all to see. We knew them of course. Even in this nasty corner of nowhere they let us watch the news, in a wall tank down in the mess, and they were the most famous criminals around. Stole a whole starship _and_ destroyed it, and were dumb enough, or brave enough, to go back to Earth afterward; Starfleet threw the book at them, hard. They were an unusual pair. It was the first time I’d seen a Vulcan in the flesh. Big and tall, wiry strong he was, and with the tackle of a stallion. Kirk was lean too, but rounder, and if he hadn’t had Spock with him he would have had to fight for his virtue. Lots of catcalls and whistles followed them down, but they didn’t know that, not then. Not until they’d been on the row a few days and seen other prisoners brought in. I remember the shock that gave me the first time I heard it.

The warders, all Tellarites of course, dumped them on the bunks in their cell and ran tricorders over them, and then buzzed the field on and left. They were directly across from me, and so while they were here we had no secrets. I watched, and Julie watched with me, the whole saga of their incarceration. If StarFleet wanted any good stories, they could ask me. Julie wouldn’t tell them anything. Julie doesn’t talk anymore, he stopped about two years ago, after the Ben’itsi brethren took him into the sonic showers and left him there.

Kirk woke first, around the middle of the ‘night’. We get ten hours of day and ten of night, on the row. I don’t know if it’s the same in other parts of the ship. They just turn on the lights and we get up and go to work, and then after they bring us back we bathe and eat and they turn off the lights. Normally we mine for rare ores, but sometimes it’s dilithium and sometimes it’s more dangerous things. Depends on the asteroid. ‘Hard labour’, they call it. They don’t know shit. It’s unbelievable, the work we do, and if the general bleeding heart population of the Federation was aware of it they’d bomb the prison ships as a mercy-killing, rather than let it go on.

I was saying how Kirk woke up first. He woke up fast, and was standing on the floor before I really understood that he’d shaken off the drugs. He didn’t look around, didn’t even bother to check the forcefield. He just knelt beside Spock’s bed and felt for a pulse on him. I watched him find it, and then put an ear to Spock’s belly, then he kind of relaxed backward and sat on the floor, staring at the alien man. I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell he was staring.

After a while he leaned forward and started slapping Spock. On the face. Hard. Julie was fascinated, and I guess I was too. I leaned forward, toward the forcefield, and watched.

Spock roared out of sleep, grabbing Kirk’s arm and thrusting it away. They stayed like that for a minute, Spock staring at Kirk and holding his arm, and Kirk kneeling beside him and looking up at him. Then Spock just let go and turned away to face the wall, curling up on his side. Kirk didn’t drop his arm for a long time, but when he did he rubbed the wrist like it hurt.

It was late then, and I was tired, so I took Julie back to bed and left the sight of Kirk kneeling alone on the floor of his cell, rubbing his wrist.

The first couple of days they survived. That’s all I can say. Those of us on the row know what those days are like, but anyone else might think I was making it up. They went to work and they went to the mess and ate, they went to bed and slept. The only thing different from the rest of us, is that when they fucked they did it by choice. Julie could almost not bear it, whimpering in our bed when they were together, their soft ‘ahs’ and ‘ohs’ echoing like prayers around the harsher ‘shit’s and ‘fuck’s of the rest of the sexually active boys on the row. Not that we don’t have a lot of queers here, not everyone is being forced. We just don’t have any love. Those two, I think they had love. Julie thought so, I am sure of that. He got so he couldn’t bear to watch them together.

The Vulcan was eerie. I don’t remember ever hearing him speak. Kirk didn’t talk much, either, but he had an occasional word with another inmate or warder. But Spock was like a stone. His face didn’t change and he was totally silent. I would see them together sometimes, Spock would reach out and just hold onto Kirk’s arm for a moment, and Kirk would blink and be still. I think that Spock was using his telepathy, and that he cared so little about the rest of us he didn’t want to be bothered talking to us. Even though he didn’t speak, even though his face didn’t change, I know a cold rage when I see one, and that man was in a bone chilling, to the core, rage.

After a week or so of our strange days, Kirk fell in the atmosphere we were working in, fell hard and cracked his head on the ore pile. Now, normally when a man falls at work we all... well, I’m not proud of what we do but we do take advantage. Besides, it can get cold in the ship, and extra clothes are always welcome. When Kirk fell, the usual suspects all started in to him, but it was like meeting an ice wall, I swear. I stood back, with Julie, and just watched. Spock killed the first man that tried to get to Kirk, and then he chopped the second, and then he did something alien to the third and he fell like a sack of rocks onto the ground, and didn’t move again.

The fourth man just put his hands up, picked up his tools, and walked away.

The guards arrived eventually, and Spock backed down and went to help Kirk. The guards didn’t say a word about the men that lay dead and half dead around the Vulcan. Not a single word.

That night I saw something I have never seen on the row before. I wonder if anyone has seen it, ever, off of Vulcan.

It started with the lights out order. Now, unless you have spent time doing time, you won’t understand that it is never dark in prison. Lights out just means they turn out the lights in the cells, but the lights in the corridors are always on. I have seen men go insane, sensitive men, from the light and noise of the row, men who need dark and quiet to sleep. For men like that, it’s just easier to die or go mad. I wish I could do it sometimes. I’m sure Julie wishes with all his heart that he could.

The lights out order echoed down the heart of the ship, and it became dim. I got up from my bunk and hunkered down by the ‘field, peering across at Kirk and Spock. Kirk had barely moved from the time the Vulcan had carried him back and put him on his bunk. We do not get doctors on the row. Dead men are taken away, live ones brought in. Anyway, Spock had put Kirk on the bottom bunk, and then lay still on the top bunk, for the bed check, like we all do.

So the lights went down. I swear that Spock is as quick as a hunting cat, he was crouched down beside the lower bunk so fast. I could make out his hands as he put them around Kirk’s head.

It got dead quiet. As if a blanket had been thrown over the row. And there was this pressing on my ears, and Julie’s too, I think. Julie was crouched back in the corner with his hands over his ears and this look of astonishment on his face.

I looked back at them, and Kirk was still and quiet. Spock moved up from the floor and straddled him on the bunk, his hands never moving from Kirk’s head. The pressing on my ears got worse; it was like being under water.

Kirk moaned. It was like a scream, so loud in the usually loud row; there was nothing and no one to compete with it. He moaned again, the only noise in that blanket of pressing presence. Then he cried out, once.

Spock lifted his hands, and he sat up straight for a moment, still straddling Kirk. Then he collapsed over Kirk, sprawling. He didn’t move again.

The blanket of stifled silence lifted, and left behind a feeling of such incredible fear and loneliness that I know I called out. Everyone cried out. There was such a shout from the inmates on the row that I was afraid, for a moment, that we were all dying.

They took them away, the next day. Same as they had come in, on stretchers, but with their clothes on this time. Rumour has it that the Vulcan government interceded and demanded they be handed over. Maybe Kirk got to a doctor, and Spock woke again from that... whatever that was.

I hope so.


End file.
